


The Children's Crusade (Day 9: Summer Camp)

by AsYouCommand (OminousHummingObelisk)



Series: AUgust All Year Long [4]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Summer Camp, Child Injury, Classism, Fantastic Racism, Gen, Runaway children, Running Away, Touch Hunger, social inequality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:37:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24500161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OminousHummingObelisk/pseuds/AsYouCommand
Summary: Imagine a future where children would never be culled.In which the young leaders of a future revolution escape their education and Pharma encounters a choice.
Series: AUgust All Year Long [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1763485
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19





	The Children's Crusade (Day 9: Summer Camp)

"We have to go tonight," Megatron said forcefully, looking each of them directly in the eyes in turn. "The camp counselors aren't watching so close. It has to be tonight."

The huddle of sparklings was underneath a cluster of dark, curving crystals on the edge of the camp compound, far enough inside the forest that they likely wouldn't be seen by any of the safety patrols. Everyone was concentrating on keeping their biolights and optics as dim as possible, and it was clearly giving some of them headaches. 

Ratchet looked earnestly at the other medical build. "We need you to come with us, Pharma. I haven't been able to talk to you before now, but we really, really need you to come." 

Pharma scowled in confusion, drawing back. "Why? What do you need me for? What are you trying to do?" 

"We don't have to live like they want us to," Megatron said, soft and steady voice still firm. "If people from all the castes work together instead of keeping apart like they do, we can all become stronger. People can live better that way; I know they can. Nuncio of the Pious Pools wrote about it a lot. And Metta of Crystal City." 

Pharma turned his scowl on Megatron. "How did a mining build learn to read anyway? You're not supposed to. The teachers said that people with your function shouldn't." 

Megatron drew himself up. "I stole a language download chip from the creche training offices. And then I learned how to sneak into the library and download books right into my drives. Soundwave helped me." The silent cassette-carrier next to him nodded. "He knows how to work the locks and things. He taught himself how." 

That sounded incredibly wrong to Pharma, as it was against everything that the caste trainers had been teaching them about how society was supposed to work. The castes were what kept everything organized. Everybody had to do their function properly, and that collective effort made everyone prosper. How did Megatron's idea of all the castes working together differ from what Pharma (and Ratchet too!) had been learning all along? People like Megatron and his transporter-caste friend Orion and that whatever-he-was Damus - they needed to focus on digging and hauling and things, not on reading books that belonged to the education-authorized castes. It wasn't right. "You shouldn't be sneaking around like that. It doesn't matter if you get caught; it's wrong to do it anyway. You should be ashamed." Pharma felt a wonderful righteous pleasure at enforcing proper social order when no adult had told him to. Doing the right thing really did feel good. 

"Information access: caste-restricted. Truth: different in different castes. Low castes: receive lies. Control of information, resources, training: methods of keeping low castes low." 

Soundwave's ugly monotone, stripped of emotional and nuance modifiers and with words brutally shoved into his own idiosyncratic grammar, practically made Pharma's plating squirm. "Why can't you talk _normally?_ " he snapped. "If you've got some glitch in your brain module, go see a doctor and get it fixed." 

After an awkward beat, Orion said, "Our castes don't get to decide to see doctors. The overseers decide. And if Soundwave isn't rated highly enough by the time he grows up, he may not ever get medical attention. And because he's a communication build with a communication problem... If his language glitch doesn't get better on its own fast enough...they might cull him." 

Soundwave had hardly displayed any emotional or social responses at all, but by the time Orion had finished speaking, he had reacted so subtly that Pharma barely caught it - the tightening of Soundwave's arms where they hugged his raised knees, the lowering of his visor, one small tremble of his shoulders. Megatron put a hand on the little carrier's back. Orion got up from his seat on the other side of Megatron, sat down beside Soundwave, and wrapped his arms around his frightened friend in a tight embrace. Soundwave's visor kept blinking on and off as he held still and let himself be comforted. 

Pharma turned his gaze away after a moment, shoving down the feeling of jealousy at the sight of those inferior, low-caste machines showing kindness to each other so freely. He couldn't remember the last time anyone had hugged him, or even touched him kindly. Maybe no one ever had. Sparklings in the scientific and medical castes were treated like very small adults, and adults never seemed to need that kind of contact. Or contact with anything apart from science and medicine, really. Pharma had often looked outside the windows of the camp's upper-caste teaching cabins and wondered why he had to stay inside all day, working with books and models and anatomical simulations while the trucks and tracks scampered about in the dirt. They did all sorts of physical things - building tiny structures, scribbling diagrams with chalk, examining the growing things and mechanimals in the surrounding forest. Their huge, lumbering camp counselors sometimes gathered them together outside to teach them in messy crowds, and sometimes they engaged in orderly chaos that Pharma thought might be games. 

His own caste's counselors never wanted to allow him any time for frivolous things. His experience of adults was mostly stern scanners and microscopes standing over him and frowning. _Have you finished your daily reading, Pharma? Have you completed your simulation tests, Pharma? Have you reviewed the diagrams and models for the test tomorrow, Pharma? Stay on task, Pharma. Be focused. Keep proper discipline. Don't let yourself be distracted, Pharma, you have far too much to do. Don't let yourself fall behind._

As if that was even possible. Pharma loved the material that he was being taught, but it was all so easy to learn that he didn't understand how anyone else in his cohort could possibly have the problems that they did with it. Even Ratchet, who was the fastest out of all the others, had trouble doing the simulations right and sometimes forgot simple things like which electrical signals advanced through which sections of the brain module in what sequence and timing in order for a mech to process visual information received from the optical hardware. Pharma had no idea how to explain it to him in any easier way; the information was just _right there_ and all anyone had to do was learn and apply it. Pharma had no trouble at all with that process, so obviously it wasn't hard to do. Maybe the others were damaged somehow and needed extra help just to perform their function, which was a little worrisome but not really his problem. He'd started concealing how fast he completed his work, pretending to puzzle over things like the others did just so that he could sneak glances out the window and watch the low-caste sparklings grubbing around outdoors, often in altmode, pulling rocks with newly-grown cables and pushing piles of dirt from place to place. 

(Ratchet was worried about his altmode because his current form was basically a small flatbed truck, but the counselors assured him that he would grow up to be a proper ambulance with all sorts of useful tools in his enclosed back end so he could perform procedures on patients as he drove them to a medical center. He was looking forward to it eagerly. They'd told Pharma that he was going to be a fast-responder aerial model, built to quickly reach remote emergencies and stabilize people onsite. He would never be large enough to be a fixed-wing medevac, and he was secretly very happy that he wouldn't have to haul people around inside his body. That sounded...uncomfortable, even though it was apparently important to a lot of the medical-caste sparklings.) 

There had been one time, not too long ago, when Pharma became tired of not understanding the lesser models and the way that his own teachers kept refusing to tell him anything, saying that it wasn't necessary for him to concern himself with their functions. Pharma felt that it was his decision what to concern himself with, and so, one day, when he'd finished that day's work and also the next two days' because there was nothing else to do, he simply opened the front door of the cabin and went outside. There wasn't a rule against that, not as far as he knew. Nobody had specifically said that it was forbidden to interact with the other castes, only that there was no point to it. He propped up his courage with these facts as he walked over to the nearest cluster of labor-builds. 

The five construction-frames all bore the same purple and bright green colors, which was odd, but...who knew what was normal for the labor caste. Three of them were bent over a mess of lines scrawled in the dirt, pointing out sections with long spines of crystal and arguing while continually erasing some lines and drawing new ones. There was a small village of lopsided buildings made of rocks and bundles of crystal twigs nearby. As Pharma cautiously approached, an especially energetic member of the group annihilated one of the little buildings - "Kaboooom!!" - flinging the components gleefully into the air. 

"Booonecrusheeer!" whined another little track, a particularly disturbing-looking one with a giant scoop hanging off his aft and dragging on the ground like a mechanimal's tail. "We just finished building that one! Look, you broke some of the sticks and now I have to go look for more that are just the right size—" 

"Just build another one out of the old stuff so I can blow it up again! That's the best part!" 

Scoop-aft looked at Bonecrusher reproachfully. "It's a lot harder to build them than blow them up, you know. Stop making like it's easy." 

Bonecrusher snorted. "Blowing stuff up can be really hard too. See, look—" He bent over one of the more complex structures, something like a multilevel hab complex that even had tiny windows and doors. (Pharma refused to acknowledge how impressed he was by the craftsmanship.) "You could blow this up so it drops straight down, so the buildings around it don't get hurt. But see, maybe I want it to fall exactly on the 35-degree line; I can do that with just one charge, just like this—" With surprisingly deft, chunky fingers, he plucked one tiny twig from a corner of the structure. The whole thing teetered slowly and then just _folded_ very tidily to the ground, all of the mess falling in the same precise direction. (Pharma refused to let himself be impressed by that either. Brain module surgery was more interesting, anyway.) 

Scoop-aft tilted his head to one side, contemplating the destruction. "Huh. Yeah, I see what you mean." 

Pharma was feeling increasingly awkward just standing nearby and watching, so he coughed a bit of air out of his vents to announce himself and asked, "What are you doing?" Scoop-aft and Bonecrusher looked up from their village and just stared at him, as if they couldn't understand what they were seeing. The other three kept squabbling over the lines in the dirt, their disagreement having devolved into a mess of stick-waving and name-calling. Pharma coughed a bit louder, wondering if that group could be more useful. "I _said_ , what are you doing? I want to learn about it." 

The trio finally looked his way, staring at him with blank confusion like the other two. Finally, one of them whispered, "You're not supposed to be here." 

"Why not? Nobody said I couldn't be." They all glanced at each other, looking concerned. "Are you going to get in trouble if your counselors see you talking to me?" 

"You're...not the same as us," another one said. "You people even outrank the overseers." His tone communicated both awe and fear. "Even grownups in our caste aren't really supposed to talk to people like you. It's just..." 

"Not something people do," another finished. 

"Yeah, that." 

Bonecrusher shook off his shock and chimed in enthusiastically, "Yeah! It's 'cause we're insusti— Innusdi— Int—" 

"In-dus-tri-al builds," said the one with a hook-and-cable system on his back, his tone superior and his diction much more precise than the others'. He looked at Pharma, his gaze sharp, as if measuring the jet up. "Industrial builds belong in the labor caste, which is ranked lower than the medical caste, which is why you can talk to us, but we're not supposed to talk to you." He lifted his chin. "Though I can't see why. People are just very complicated machines. If someone can learn how to fix complicated machines, then he can learn how to fix people; that just makes logical sense. You shouldn't have to be forged special to fix people instead of machines." 

Pharma blinked. "You're an idiot," he stated, as perhaps nobody had ever informed the young crane of that fact and/or he wasn't smart enough to figure it out on his own. 

" _You little—!_ " The crane's visor flashed and he lunged forward. 

Pharma had never faced a direct physical threat in his existence and realized that, although they were all probably about the same age, the construction builds were at least three times his mass and extremely capable of severely injuring him. He stumbled back several steps, spark spinning hard, but three of the crane's companions grabbed onto him and held him in place. 

"Hook! _Hook!_ Don't be stupid—!"  
"They'll take you away if you hurt him! Don't touch him!"  
"Just let him do whatever! Just don't—" 

Hook went still, allowing himself to be restrained. His mouth was set in a fierce, flat line. " _I'm_ not the idiot," he growled. "You're wrong." 

Before Pharma could work out how to explain simple, self-evident facts to these strange people, another voice came from behind him, "Hey, what happened? Did you guys seriously steal this medic kid from somewhere?" 

"Scrapper's back!" Scoop-aft yelled cheerfully, still keeping a death grip on Hook's hook. 

"Of course we didn't steal him," Hook gritted out, continuing to glare at Pharma from the cage of his companions' hands. "He shoved himself into our business and started talking like he owned the place. Like people in his caste do." The others hastily shushed him, with Bonecrusher going so far as to clamp a hand over Hook's mouth. 

Pharma turned and saw yet another purple-and-green construction sparkling walking up while eying Pharma concernedly, six cubes of fuel held to his chest. "The chow line was really long," he said, perhaps choosing to ignore the apparently forbidden things that his teammate had said. He glanced at the mess of lines in the dirt and groaned. "Guys, I left you alone for ten minutes and look what you did to the blueprint. It was fine the way we had it." 

"Nuh-uh! We can make it way better with a foundation slab—"  
"Mix, you're gonna get in so much trouble if they have to ungunk concrete from your drum again—"  
"They won't! I fixed the blend and it's right this time—"  
"You said it was right the last five times—"  
"But I'm right this time!"  
"Stop being mean to Mix! He's trying!"  
"He's stupid."  
" _You're_ stupid!" 

And so the five of them swung back into a shouting match with poor Scrapper trying to peacemake as he shoved cubes into his companions' hands. Everyone seemed to have forgotten that Pharma was even there, but after his near-death experience with Hook, he couldn't find a problem with that. 

"Children!" a very deep voice called from the direction of the labor-caste bunkhouses. Pharma felt his fear returning as an absolutely enormous adult track - some kind of excavation alt - started striding over to their little group. He'd never seen a member of the labor caste up close before. Never had he been so aware of his smallness and relative frailty. The mech was so huge and powerful that he could literally crush Pharma under one foot. "Come along, now," the grownup said gently, finally gaining the attention of his young caste-mates. "It's time for the midday service. We're holding it in Brook Grove today." 

"Yayyyy!" Scoop-aft fearlessly clamped onto the adult's shin armor. His head didn't even reach the counselor's knee. "I love Brook Grove! There's so many shiny rocks there!" 

The excavator looked down at the sparkling fondly, bending low to pat his head. "Brother Waymaker is going to read a chapter from the Book of Humility for us and then we'll have rust sticks after our prayers." 

"Yayyyy!" 

_Rust_ sticks? What were these poor creatures living on? ...Pharma's alarm abated when he remembered reading about something like this, a confection composed of a rare-earth core with a coating based on cuprous oxide— 

"Do we _have_ to go?" mumbled Hook, still in a foul mood. The counselor gave him a hurt look. 

"Hook'll come, Teacher," Scoop-aft asserted. "He loves rust sticks. He's just being grumpy today." 

The adult track caught sight of Pharma and a subtle tension immediately filled his frame. "Go run ahead, children. You can still find good seats if you're quick. Go on, now." 

The color-matched sparklings took off running, shouting and shoving and tripping each other as they headed for the forest. Pharma watched them go. He'd never met stranger people. 

He looked up immediately when the counselor slowly took another step closer. Fear surged again. The heavy builds seemed to fight and manhandle each other as part of their everyday socializing; was this huge machine going to crush him, just because Pharma was fragile and out of his proper place? Was he about to die? Shamefully, he felt sparks gathering at the corners of his optics. 

But the excavator bowed his head, gaze fixed on the ground at Pharma's feet. "Medical Student," he intoned carefully, using the formal modifiers that made the function title into a substitute for a person's name. "Please permit me to escort you to your proper cabins. I apologize for any inconvenience that you may have suffered." 

Pharma opened his mouth, uncertain of how to respond, but suddenly he heard the cabin door opening and realized that his own caste counselors would probably have noticed that he was missing by now. "Pharma! What are you doing out here?" He turned and saw the lanky frame of Tertiary Counselor Diffusion hurrying down the cabin stairs. He looked furious, but his attention was on the labor-caste counselor, not on the errant student. Pharma looked back up at the track and saw him wringing his hands nervously, apparently frightened by the electron microscope storming toward him. It was so strange to see such a mighty person so afraid, and of someone so relatively powerless. 

He knew that there was a dynamic in place that he didn't fully understand, and that it would result in the lower-caste mech being severely punished even though Pharma was the cause of the problem. Feeling uncomfortable at the thought, Pharma spoke before his counselor could begin laying into the innocent excavator. "Tertiary Counselor Diffusion, forgive me for the trouble. I left the cabin on my own because I was curious, and Labor-Caste Camp Counselor was concerned for my safety and was escorting me back to the correct sector. The blame for this incident is entirely mine." 

Diffusion was clearly taken off-balance by the declaration. He glared up at the excavator, who was holding perfectly still and seemed to have even stopped his ventilation fans. Diffusion then looked down at Pharma, who put on his most charming nothing-amiss-here look and fluttered his wings in a way that he knew was devastatingly adorable, all of which had the desired effect of making his counselor do what Pharma wanted him to. "...Very well. We will put this incident behind us. Come back inside, Pharma." 

Once the door had closed behind them, Diffusion leaned down and gripped Pharma's shoulder vent hard. "Do not waste your curiosity on the lower castes again. They have absolutely nothing of worth to impart and no culture to speak of. They are below us for a reason. Do you understand?" 

He wanted the pain in his shoulder to stop. "Yes, Counselor, completely." 

Diffusion released him, to his great relief. "Then it is good that you have at least learned something from this. Now, have you completed today's simulation trials?" 

In the present day, in the forest at night, Pharma was shaken out of his uncomfortable memories by a touch on his hand. He flinched hard, looked to his left, and found himself staring into Damus' single crude optic. The touch on his hand had come from the mutilated auto's claw. Pharma distantly thought that he should feel disgusted by contact with the twisted, clumsy thing, but he felt so mixed-up inside and it grounded him. He stared at the battered digits tentatively pressed against his finely-forged, inimitable, immensely valuable medical-build hand and somehow he felt...better. 

"Please come with us," Damus said softly, static hazing his voice from his secondhand, half-junked vocalizer. "Ratchet said that you're the best, not just in your cohort but the best in a long, long time. You could help us so much. Maybe you could fix Soundwave's language center. And maybe you could even— If you— If you wanted to—" Damus turned his pseudo-face away and withdrew his claw, tangling it with the other in his lap. 

Pharma huffed hot air from his vents restlessly. He'd known that the duty of being a doctor involved people relying on you to help with things that few others could do, but having other sparklings see him as important to their runaway social experiment because they needed his medical expertise - not in the future, when he was fully trained and licensed, but right now, as if he was already enough to save anyone - that was deeply discomfiting. "I'm not that special. I just learn what they teach me. I don't think that I'm smarter or anything; it's just that everybody else doesn't try hard enough—" 

Ratchet's temper flared. "Pharma, you're really stupid for a genius." Pharma opened his mouth but Ratchet refused to give him room. "Do you just not notice anything? You don't see how the teachers don't even know what to do with you, like don't you know that the extra lessons they give you are advanced ones for full-frame trainees? They don't just make you do more of the same basic stuff that the rest of us are doing. You're not even half grown yet and you're doing trauma surgery sims. And everybody can see that you're _still bored._ It's not that the rest of us are dumber than we should be; it's that you're a _freak_ who breaks every curve that ever existed and you're so smart that you _scare_ people." 

"Ratchet," Orion said softly. "Don't say things like that." 

"Why not, if it's true?" 

Pharma curled in on himself. Nobody had ever described his performance in quite those terms. But it wasn't that he hadn't noticed those things. He just hadn't wanted to notice. He was afraid to pay attention because of what they might mean. "I'm not a freak," he whispered. 

He felt the very edge of an EM field and knew that Damus was reaching out again but didn't dare to touch. The chaos welled up inside of him - the comfort that the lower castes were allowed to offer to each other, the memory of the terrified laborer-counselor, the things that his teachers had said when he'd asked about Damus, any number of other, unarticulated thoughts - and he reached out and took that hesitant claw, squeezing it tightly though he didn't turn to look at its owner. His finely-tuned medic hand could feel how the claw's dermal metal was so malformed that Damus could probably barely feel the contact. The other sparkling stiffened as if afraid, but then Damus slowly relaxed and gently squeezed Pharma's hand in return. 

"I'm living garbage," Damus told him, as if commenting on the weather. "The caretakers don't even bother to hide it from me anymore. They used to hope that I'd be useful somehow because I was forged with a special kind of spark, but I'm not good for anything, so I'm going to be culled. I don't know when. I don't even know why they sent me here, because I can't be trained to do anything. I'm not worth the fuel that's wasted on me, they said." 

He could feel Damus' EM field - an even pulse, undisturbed, unconcerned. Pharma felt his entire body turning cold. He looked up into the other sparkling's blurry optic. "Why?" 

Damus gave his hand another squeeze, as if he were trying to comfort Pharma in the face of Damus' own suffering. "Right after I'd finished forming, when I was about to get scanned, I broke a really big, important machine by accident. I couldn't help it, and it hurt me a lot to do it, but they said that no one was above the law and I had to be an example, so...they did this to me. So people could see what happened to anybody who did crimes against society." 

Pharma's teachers had described the mutilation as the price of certain acts so terrible that not even sparklings could go unpunished after committing them. _Something like murder?_ Pharma had asked. _Did that sparkling kill someone?_

_Oh no_ , he'd been told with a chuckle. _Murder doesn't require that sort of punishment. Empurata is for far worse crimes._ And he'd been left to twist his mind around the question of what atrocities that small, shy auto could have committed so early in life to rate the worst punishment that existed. 

"You... You were a social criminal. Before you even had a function, for... Just for breaking a machine." 

Damus looked down, embarrassed. "It was a really big, expensive, important machine. I basically shut down the whole processing center for a long time. They said it was an assault on social infa— infit-structure and a really serious crime, so... But it happened because of my special spark. It makes it so I break machines that aren't people, just by touching them, and they have to be almost totally rebuilt to make them work again. People with sparks like I have are supposed to have special powers, but mine isn't good for anything. And because I can't touch machines, I can't really have a function. I could haul metal to help with construction or something, but my frame is just a standard auto, so I'm no good for that kind of work either. I'm not useful for anything at all." Damus went quiet and gazed down at their joined hands, apparently distracting himself by experimentally flexing his claws one by one around Pharma's perfect fingers. "That's why I want to go with Megatron and start a new kind of society. The one we have now is going to kill me soon because I'm a waste of fuel. So it doesn't really matter what I do anyway. And Megatron and Orion say that everybody has value; everybody can live together and help each other and nobody has to be nonfunctional or a waste because people should get to choose their function. You can't be nonfunctional if you choose a function that fits you." 

Damus looked across the circle at Megatron and Orion, who both met his gaze and nodded, their optics shining with certainty. Pharma tried to swallow the leaden lump in his throat as he dully wondered what sort of function could suit someone who couldn't even operate nonsapient machinery, whether he was allowed to choose it or not. He could feel the ripples in the little auto's EM field, a strong, bright _happiness_ as he looked at the ones who had given him back his hope. Damus was unwavering while Pharma felt lost. 

He remembered watching Damus through the cabin windows, unconsciously searching for him in the lower-caste crowds. Although the poor creature usually stayed near the cabins (and Pharma eventually realized that it was because Damus' optic sometimes shorted out and he used large objects to keep himself oriented), he was easy to pick out because of the crude face and claws that no other sparkling had. Most of the others avoided him. Few seemed to actually hate him, perhaps because everyone was too young to understand what had been done to him and why. Some looked at him sadly from a distance, as if they wanted to do something but were afraid to go near. Some stared openly at him in horrified fascination and would sometimes drag him into the open to poke at his replaced components. Damus was not an especially interesting target for bullies, as his attackers quickly became bored when he simply went limp on the ground, unresisting. Those ugly claws continually picked and scratched at the places where the replacements had been hastily attached, leaving him with paintless patches on his wrists and neck that sometimes were spotted with rust. 

Yet now the little empuratee was squeezing Pharma's hand gently and looking at him with such calm confidence that the jet felt shaken. He ended up having to drop his gaze from that of the single optic, turning his face back toward the two labor-caste ringleaders. "How... Where are you even going to go? There's no way to get through the fences..." 

"Senator Shockwave is going to help us," Megatron said confidently. 

Pharma blinked at him. "Senator Shockwave? The counselor for the alpha-caste section?" The most elite of all the camp sectors had only a handful of students and its own surrounding security wall. The counselors were occasionally seen walking through other sectors on their way to more important places, but the campers themselves were never seen by sparklings of lesser castes. Shockwave had quickly gained notoriety during this camp cycle due to his scandalous habit of looking at people of lower castes, greeting them, and asking them how they were doing. Absolutely no one could figure that mech out, and many of the medical counselors were very worried that he was teaching unacceptable things to the young ones in his care. Given that sort of track record, perhaps it shouldn't have been surprising that he was apparently assisting a group of lower-caste children in breaking out of the camp and...who knew what else? "Are you sure it's...safe? I heard...sometimes adults steal sparklings. To do awful things to them. Maybe he's—" 

"Senator Shockwave would never do that," Orion chastened, also with complete confidence. "He's a good person. If you met him, you'd know." 

"He let me download the first book by Nuncio that I ever read," Megatron said, angered at hearing his mentor's decency being called into question. "From his very own datapad, when he caught me sneaking into the library one time. He never told anybody anything." 

"Senator Shockwave: contacted each here individually." Soundwave clarified. "Senator Shockwave: concerned for safety of those most likely to be...discarded. Senator Shockwave: wishes for change." 

"He doesn't believe that anyone should have to be culled," Orion said. "He thinks that people can live without the castes being the way that they are, that society would still be okay if they were different." 

"I don't think people need castes at all," Megatron replied hotly, but Orion just gusted his vents at him. Apparently, this was an old argument. 

It all sounded absolutely insane to Pharma. 

The twisted little claw gently squeezed his hand again and he looked over into Damus' eye. "The senator told me that I'm a real person, like anybody else. He said it's okay for people like me to be alive," he said softly. "He thinks that my spark could still be useful somehow. ...I want to try.” 

"And I want to help," Ratchet said. "I don't like how the medical caste says that some people are more worth helping than others. I want to help everybody and not care who they are. And if you come with us, we could help so many more people. Like Damus, with his empurata, and Soundwave, and miners with throttled fuel systems—" 

"Ratchet, you're never going to get licensed if you do this!" One of the worst imaginable fates for a medical-caste sparkling! 

"I don't care," Ratchet snorted. "Senator Shockwave said I can still get trained. I don't want a license - I just want to help people." 

"Come with us," Damus all but whispered. "Please, Pharma." 

Thoughts began to coalesce in Pharma's mind as he looked at Damus' not-face. He didn't fully understand the empurata process, but his mind was already beginning to collect pieces of simulations that he'd done and assemble them into a complete procedure - he was sure that it could be undone. Damus...didn't deserve to live like this. He should have a face and hands... He felt his spark squirming uncomfortably, as if a precipice was approaching and he feared to look over the edge. "But how are you going to get out?" 

"We're going to meet the senator at a crossroads near the second gate," Megatron said. "We don't know what his plan is, but he has one. He's going to get us out and far away, and we're going to grow up in a better place with other kids that he's saved and learn better things, like what Nuncio talks about—" 

The children all paused as strange planes of red laser light sliced through the spaces between the underbrush, rushing back and forth; Pharma recognized them as a warbuild's targeting scanners a second before the heavy clank and rattle of hard ammo chambering in half a dozen cannons broke the hush and sent lileths screaming from their perches overhead. 

" _Intruder!_ " the warbuild roared from the edge of the underbrush. " _Come out and identify yourself!_ " 

"Oh slag!" Megatron hissed. The escapees started to scramble to their feet, as if it were possible to outrun bullets. Pharma stumbled up with them, thinking that he should just call out and tell the security mech that they were just campers, and he would just send them back— 

" _You have ten seconds! Lethal force is authorized!_ " 

The others were scattering into the shards, moving deeper into the forest. Megatron stayed just to grab hold of Damus, but Damus pulled his hand free and latched onto Pharma's arm, leaning back, trying to pull him along with all of his weight. "Pharma, you have to come! Pharma, _please!_ " he said, soft as a gasp. 

"Damus, come on!" Megatron gritted. The superior strength of the little mining-build finally ripped the auto free. Pharma whimpered as Damus' claws tore into his plating as he lost his grip. Megatron dragged him away, and the last that Pharma saw of them was Damus still reaching out over Megatron's shoulder. 

He had been unable to move. His fears had welled up inside of him, no matter what they had said, no matter how he had begun to realize how he could help, how he might even belong with them, as Ratchet belonged. He had feared for himself, his education, his future, and it had been too much to overcome— As he heard the sounds of their fleeing fade, a hollowness rose up inside of him, the pain of a choice made badly and irreversibly. He felt more alone than he had ever felt, and he cradled the bleeding cuts on his arm as if they were a memento of something that he had lost. 

He heard the series of clacks which indicated that the warbuild was about to fire, and he realized that he could do at least one thing to help their cause. He turned and began to shove his way free of the brush, shouting, "Wait, please! I'm a student! I'm lost! Please, I need help!" 

The warbuild gave a distrustful growl, but held his fire until Pharma stumbled into the open, fuel dripping down over one hand. He looked up and saw the enormous security mech towering over him. As with the labor-caste counselor, the size and power of the killing machine before him was utterly terrifying and he froze. The warbuild had extended the bracing spines from the lower knees of his digitigrade legs, turning each limb into a stable tripod to keep his cannons steady. The belt-fed weapons continued to track to and fro on his shoulders and forearms, each on an extra limb to let them move independently. The spirals of coiled-up energy lashes huddled behind his wrists. Asymmetrical clusters of lenses covered his face and a horror of jagged mandibles hung beneath them. Shifting patches of pixelated camo seethed across his plating. For the second time in his life, Pharma felt that he was about to die, as if it could not be possible to encounter such a creature and survive. 

For his part, the warbuild drew back a little in surprise when he saw Pharma; in fact, he withdrew his spines and actually backed up a couple of steps, lifting every cannon to point at the sky. "What're you—uh." He made a garbled noise as he shuffled his linguistics around. "Medical Student?" 

"Yes, Security Facilitator. I'm Medical Student Pharma. I know that I'm not where I should be. I'm sorry." 

A few of the warbuild's facial lenses rolled to one side, as if looking back over the camp and taking note of how the medical sector was literally all the way on the other side of the complex. "Medical Student, may I inquire as to how you came to be here?" His voice was so deep and harsh that Pharma felt it rattling his plating against his endoskeletal struts. 

"Please forgive me, but I had acquired some unauthorized literature about nocturnal mechanimal life in this region and wished to observe them in the wild while at this facility. But I became lost, and when I heard you call out, I fell and tore my armor on the brush." He held up his injured arm and the warbuild's armor slicked back as if he were hunching in on himself at the sight of the wound. 

"Medical Student, please allow me to escort you back to your sector and arrange medical attention immediately." 

"Of course. Thank you." 

The huge mech turned toward the other side of the camp. "Please stay beside me as we walk." 

"Um..." 

He turned back. "Is there another concern that I might assist you with?" 

Pharma looked up at him and remembered the careful grip of Damus' claw, the comforting touches that the lower-caste children gave to each other that were so strange and rare in his world. He remembered how fearlessly the little track had clung to his enormous counselor's leg. Would it be selfish and manipulative of him to ask— "Security Facilitator...please, will you carry me?" He felt so alone, his spark aching, and the touch had been so comforting. When he returned to the world of the medical caste, he might never be touched again. He might never have another chance to even speak with the people who knew and valued touch. 

"Carry you? Of course, but...is it permitted?" 

Pharma bit his lip and decided not to back down. "I feel somewhat faint from the loss of fuel—" 

"Yes, of course. We will go to the clinic immediately." After another moment of hesitation, likely remembering for himself that the upper castes did not handle each other, the warbuild bent down and extended one hand. His talons were immense hooks, each almost as long as the rest of the finger, and he had to carefully maneuver himself before he could spread them in a way that made it safe for Pharma to sit down on his palm. As Pharma did so, the mech visibly cringed again. "Please, Medical Student, be cautious of the sharp edges..." He was awkwardly holding his hand out from himself as if Pharma were a live munition. 

"I could lean up against your chest?" Why not manipulate himself into the complete experience, while he was at it? 

The warbuild brought his hand in close and Pharma was able to settle himself against the cool carapace. If he pressed his head and hands against it, his finely-forged senses could detect the powerful throb of the mech's spark deep inside his body, inside a dozen nested layers of armor. He listened contentedly to it, curled up on the mech's palm, surrounded by the protective cage of his talons, and he felt absolutely safe. Such was the warrior's gracefulness that Pharma hardly swayed at all when the warbuild began striding swiftly across the compound. 

Shockwave had spoken to the security mechs like he had spoken to everyone else, hadn't he? And nothing bad had happened, so— "Security Facilitator, what is your designation?" 

"My...?" He shuffled his mandibles in a way that seemed a little embarrassed. Perhaps this camp was also a place where young warbuilds came to train? Was this what a warbuild child looked like, already the size and structure of an adult? "I am called Nails." 

"Nails." The etymology rose drowsily inside his mind as his eyes closed and he relaxed even more against the other's armor. "Many devices which serve to attach one surface to another, being spikes driven through said surfaces by force. In the combat dialect, 'he shoots and kills.'" 

"Um...just so, yes." Another nervous self-stroking of mandibles. 

"I'm happy to have met you, Nails. Thank you for helping me." 

"I'm...happy to have met you also. My duty is my pleasure." He recited it as if he had learned it by rote. "Please take more care in the future, Medical Student." 

Pharma wished that he had taken less care of himself. When he was restricted to his room for the next three days for flagrant disobedience, it was all that he could think of, so much so that, for the first time in his life, his studies were difficult. He had feared too much for himself, and in doing so, he had lost something that could never be regained.

**Author's Note:**

> = "You fool!" I cry, grabbing myself by the collar and giving myself a firm shake. "What madness is this? Do you not see that 80% of this thing is tangents and asides?" "Yolo," I say, looking myself dead in the eye as I slam that Post button with a hammer.
> 
> = I kind of like the idea of Minitron being a fanboy for somebody else's sociopolitically transgressive literature long before writing his own. 
> 
> = One nifty thing about the Bayverse was that the less-human and fully nonhuman Decepticon designs seemed to be so for the sake of expedience or improved functioning. They were more specialized than human-shaped people, but that also made their bodies more effective tools, like animals' bodies are. I like that kind of design trend, as it emphasized (realistically, I think) that all parts of a person have to be built to certain specifications to make them ideally suited to their altmode's function. So, not just that one person has microscope kibble and another has tank kibble, but that different people's endoskeletal structures and component materials can be so radically different that they can look very alien compared to each other. What makes a good tank is really different from what makes a good microscope, after all. There's not a lot that I can remix about canon characters, but I prefer my OCs designed along these alien-because-functional lines.


End file.
